April 8, 2024 • 15 mins
Timothy Sandefur is the Vice President for Legal Affairs at the Goldwater Institute’s Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation and holds the Duncan Chair in Constitutional Government.
He joined Jack Armstrong to talk about some of the big topics in the news! Listen to The Armstrong & Getty Extra Large Interview and other Extra Large interviews with Tim below!
Follow Tim on X HERE and check out some of his videos below!
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Right now, we'd like to welcome to the Armstrong and
Getty show fan favorite who we used to call Tim,
the lawyer Tim Sandford. He's the vice president of litigation
for the Goldwater Institute.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Welcome Tim, Thanks for having me that guys.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Our main question, of course, is what is the libertarian
opinion on solar eclipses.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
You're against the.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Fantastic So I follow your Twitter feed, which I think
is everybody should follow because it's damn damn interesting. You
were upset when local university to you you're in Arizona
paid Ebram x Kendy how much money to come.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
Talk at a university?
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Thirty five thousand dollars for a one hour speech. And
he is famous for what well, he's of course the
primary intellectual in the anti racism movement, so called because
in fact he's a proponent of racism. It's just racism
against a different group of people, so it's therefore okay.
He's quite open about this fact. He said the only
(01:03):
remedy for past discrimination is future discrimination, and he's in
favor of that. And so that was the propaganda that
he was willing to stew for an hour at Arizona
State University and charge the Arizona tax payers thirty five
thousand dollars for it.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Yeah, he's the guy that invented this whole idea of
there's no such thing as being not racist. You're either
racist or anti racist, which is yes.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
And therefore there are acceptable forms of racism, and that
means hating white people is acceptable, whereas anybody else it's
not acceptable. And you know, of course, this is nothing new,
this sort of this doctrine that it's okay for the
so called oppressed to be racist against those who have
allegedly oppressed them. You know, that's well over a century old.
(01:47):
It was you know, fashioned first in Germany in the
nineteen twenties.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Right, So this transitions nicely into the fact that DEI training,
kind of similar to the ibramex candy philosophy, is catch
and fire all across the country, or has over the
last several years, businesses, universities, schools, all that sort of stuff,
and the Goldwater Institute is playing a role in that.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
What are you guys doing?
Speaker 2 (02:12):
That's right? And now Arizona passed the law not long ago,
and a few other states have copied this law that
prohibits the government from requiring people who work for universities
to take any kind of training in what the law
refers to as divisive concepts. That is, the idea that
you are responsible for the crimes committed by others of
(02:35):
your racial group in the past, or that you ought
to feel guilty, or that the or that you know
the country is evil because of these things, et cetera,
et cetera. You know, if you want to spew that
kind of thing, you're perfectly free to do so, but
you shouldn't be able to make me pay for it.
And so the Arizona legislature passed this law prohibiting mandatory
DEI training and prohibiting the government from spending tax para
(02:57):
money to develop such training even if they don't actually
require it. And a FU has basically thumbed their noses
at this, and they've been requiring their faculty to take
and pass this training program in DEI, and not just
take it once, but every every few years. You have
to retake it to make sure that you haven't, you know,
(03:17):
somehow become a racist in the interim.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
What sort of things will they will they, I don't know,
require you to believe with this DEI training, this particular quality.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
The The de I training consists of things like explaining
why you know certain forms of expression or you know, microaggressions,
why you need to watch what you say in order
to because there are people with different backgrounds who have
different perspectives who might interpret what you say in a
way that is offensive, and so forth and so on,
(03:49):
and it's it's the usual sort of thing that we've
become accustomed to in the past decade or so. But
the big problem here is that this is a form
of right thing, a form of indoctrination that is basically
requiring you to step up and agree. And it's no
different than if the school were to require you to
(04:10):
take training in a religious view If they said you
are required to sit here and take our day long
training on why the earth was created in four thousand
and four BC, and why the Gospels of the literal
Truth and every other religion is false. We would obviously say,
you know, people are free to believe those things, but
(04:30):
they shouldn't be able to force taxpayers to shoulder the burden.
And that's exactly what's going on. Anti racism so called,
is just a new religious viewpoint. It's a dogma that
can't be shaken by facts or logic. It's just been
a belief that people adhere to for personal reasons of
their own, and they're welcome to that, but they shouldn't
be able to force tax payers to subsidize it.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
This is a ViBe's question, not a legal question. Do
you feel like the DEI thing peaked a while back
and it's in retreat, we're on the march.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
I do think that, I do think that it has peaked.
I think it's going to be around for a while.
Of course, because these things never completely go away. They
didn't go away after the first time that the ancestor
of DEEI was defeated in the April of nineteen forty five,
and it's stuck around and it's come back, and I
think it'll stick around even after this. But I do
(05:24):
think people are tired of it and they're sick of it,
and I think there are some great examples of this.
There was oh my gosh, I'm blanking on the title
of the movie, but there was a movie that satirized
the cultural attitude in particularly the East Coast, toward race
and how everything just has to be categorized in back
(05:44):
and it was nominated for an Oscar, and there are
other comedies and things that are starting to make fun
of this, and people are just tired of it. I
think the culture is turning away from it and saying
enough of saying that it's okay to be racist against
white people. Why don't we just, you know, accept the
idea that all people are created equal and that it's
wrong to engage in retaliatory racism.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
I hope you're right about that, that it is on
the retreat.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
It feels that way to me too, but it might
be you know, the people I follow versus the rest
of the world that it's People talk a lot about
being in a bubble or whatever.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
It's hard not to be in a bubble, wouldn't you agree?
Speaker 2 (06:24):
I mean, you got to work at it, you really.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
You have to really seek out other sources otherwise you
just keep you know, we all talk amongst ourselves to
each other and agreed, And.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
It's funny because we all thought that the advent of
blogging and Twitter and Facebook would would make it easier
to get outside of our bubbles, and I guess it does,
But it also makes it easier to stay inside your
bubble if you choose to.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
Oh, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Yeah, which a different topic, and I want to get
back to the DEI, but do you have any opinions
of where you think artificial intelligence is going to take us?
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Oh so far my dealings with artificial intelligence it consisted
of me yelling at Alexa for not understanding my question,
or just this week, you know, yelling at at like
a madman at Walmart's chadbot for not delivering my item
within the week that it claimed it would. And I
feel like an old man screaming at clouds. So yeah, no,
(07:21):
I don't really think it's at the stage or we
can predict where it's going to go.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
Man, it's certainly not there yet. Yeah. I was yelling
at the old.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Enough to remember when virtual reality was going to be
the wave of the future, or the Segue was going
to revolutionize life.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Yeah, yeah, well Segue, Yeah, definitely. Segue was supposed to
be huge and didn't do anything. But like I've done
the Apple Vision pro and I think, man, I think
this could be a big thing for learning or whatever.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
I was screaming at the automated thing at the pharmacy yesterday,
what can I help you with? And whenever that the
computer says what can I help you with? I always
know you're not going to understand my question or my problem,
and they never do.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Never Jack Jack. Yesterday, Alexa asked me if I wanted
her to tell me when it was snowing. I live
in Phoenix, Arizona, so I said, yes, please tell me
if it's nos.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
I lost my temper on one of those things the
other day. My kids found it hilarious. I was really
screaming personally.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
It's fun of having them, having the fun of having
them as losing your temper. That's that's why I like it.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
Back to the DEI training, so I understand that pretty
clear cut on why you don't want taxpayer money going
to various colleges to teach people that racism is the
way to fix things. Is there anything to be done
in private corporations other than culturally?
Speaker 2 (08:45):
I do think so, but it takes something that private
corporations lack, and that is courage. Unfortunately, history has shown
that the last institution you can look for to defend
freedom is private businesses. Private businesses, large corporations especially, are
moral cowards, and they very much enjoy profiting off of
(09:07):
the latest trend. No matter how antithetical to capitalism and
how self destructive it might be. And look at how
industry funds the universities, donating money to these campuses where
the teaching is almost uniformly anti capitalists, and all that
private industry is doing by doing that is feeding and
generating its own destroyers. And the corporate world. What if
(09:32):
there is anybody in the corporate world with a conscience
and the clarity to see the importance of moral issues
and political issues, they need to cut it off. And
this is another reason why you asked earlier about optimism.
I'm kind of optimistic in that I think the backlash
against the universities because of the anti semitism that we've
seen lately, I think that's a very healthy development.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Yeah, that's a really interesting observation that corporations, especially big corporations,
almost all ways do the cowardly thing and whatever the
latest hot trend is, even if it's anti corporation, how
do they, after all these years, think this will get
us on the right side of the young people and
then the love our big, giant, evil corporation.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
It is never what I saw far.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
I don't understand. In the nineteen seventies, the companies like
Exxon would run advertisements about how their fuel was the
basis of civilization and it's the good thing, and that
was great. They need to do that stuff again. But
instead every day it's more apologizing for the very fact
that they exist, feeding the alligator, hoping it will eat
(10:39):
them last. And I think if corporate America woke up
to how stupid that is and took a stand in
self defense and said, you know what, we own this property,
it's ours. We have the right to do with that.
We will want. We have economic freedom, we have the
right to make contracts and profit from our hard work.
We are generating and perpetuating civilization in this world, and
(10:59):
we have right and they deserve to be respected. I
think if a corporation stood up and said that, I
think people would rally to their support. I think Americans
are sick to death of the apologizing and they and
they would love to see somebody in the corporate world
with backbone, and they just they just don't see it.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
Well, I think you're absolutely right, and the first corporation
that does that is going to get so many huzzahs.
You can lay out a screed pretty well. I know
you never had any interest in getting to politics. But
I could see you on a stage really getting people
fired up if you ever decided to go that direction.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
I couldn't take the pay set.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
Yeah, this might be Tim talking in his personal life
rather than representing Goldborger on this question, Tim, I thought
about this over the weekend.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
I almost texted you, but I thought I wanted to
ask you on the air.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
So the Supreme Court, with one of the rulings fairly
recently unleashed the world of legalized gambling across this country,
sports betting, and there's a basket. Tim's not a sports fan.
There's a big basketball tournament going on right now known
as March Madness. It has turned into the biggest legal
gambling event in American history, maybe a world history.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
Where do you come down on.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
This?
Speaker 1 (12:11):
I'm assuming that the libertarian view is why would the
government get in the way of you wanting to gamble?
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Yes, In fact, that's so much my view that I
kind of was puzzled by what your question could be.
Of course, people should have the right to bet whatever
they want on the sporting event if they're stupid enough
to do that.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
Right, So I assume that would be the view and
that's my view too.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
I hate the idea of the government being able to
tell this now we probably shouldn't, but the reality is
you just said, stupid enough to do it. Lots of
people lose lots of money and get themselves into trouble.
Speaker 3 (12:42):
What's society's role then?
Speaker 2 (12:45):
Yeah, So now you've hear it on a point that
I think is really important, which is you cannot have
freedom unless you are willing to let people sail.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
Right.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
If you aren't willing to let people pay the price
for their bad choices, then you are also not willing
to let them enjoy the rewards for their wise choices.
And what the what the free market says is people
should be allowed to make their own decisions and be
rewarded for their wise choices and pay the cost of
(13:15):
their unwised choices. But if you go around wiping everybody's noses,
then you are eventually going to have to take their
freedom away. If you promise to pay for everybody's you know,
whatever it might be healthcare costs, for example, that's going
to create what the economists called moral hazard. It's going
to encourage people to engage in unhealthy activities because why not, right,
you're going to pay their medical bills, so they might
(13:37):
as well do whatever they feel like. Well, eventually you're
going to go bankrupt that way. So pretty soon you
start saying, look, I'll pay for your health care, but
you must promise me not to you know, eat red
meat or whatever it is. And eventually you start putting
so many strings on all of the benefits you're giving
people that you're taking their freedom away, and that is inevitable,
it's inescapable. So you cannot have freedom unless you are
(13:58):
willing to let people make bad choices and suffer accordingly.
So my answer to that is if people bet the
farm on a basketball game and they lose the farm,
then they lose the farm. And if that puts them
at the point of poverty, then they need to come
to me and ask me politely if I will give
them a second chance, and it's up to me to decide,
(14:18):
based on their character and their past behavior, their responsibility,
whether they've turned over a new leaf, etc. Whether I'm
going to decide to help them out in that crisis.
And that is the only humane system in the world.
People act like there's something cool about that. Quite the reverse,
because my doing that respects that person as a human being,
(14:38):
respects their humanity, and treats them like an equal human
being capable of running their own lives. It's the allegedly
compassionate people who go around trying to take away people's
freedom and then pay their bills, who are actually treating
other people like their children, who are treating other people
like their animals, who can't make decisions for themselves. Now,
I'm saying that people should be free to make their
own choices and joy their profits and suffer their rewards accordingly,
(15:02):
and I think that the ultimate outcome will be better
for everybody. I don't think you will have people starving
in the street. The three or the society. The more
generous it is, It's always been that way. We are
incredibly generous as a society precisely because we are so free.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
That is the fantastic answer that I knew I would
get by asking you about this. Where do you want
people to follow you or turn to you or your
substack or whatever.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
You can find me at Sandford dot typepad dot com
or at Timothy Sandford on Twitter and just google me.
I'm all over the place, one of the most interesting
people around Armstrong and Getty
Right now, we'd like to welcome to the Armstrong and
Getty show fan favorite who we used to call Tim,
the lawyer Tim Sandford. He's the vice president of litigation
for the Goldwater Institute.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Welcome Tim, Thanks for having me that guys.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
Our main question, of course, is what is the libertarian
opinion on solar eclipses.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
You're against the.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Fantastic So I follow your Twitter feed, which I think
is everybody should follow because it's damn damn interesting. You
were upset when local university to you you're in Arizona
paid Ebram x Kendy how much money to come.
Speaker 3 (00:38):
Talk at a university?
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Thirty five thousand dollars for a one hour speech. And
he is famous for what well, he's of course the
primary intellectual in the anti racism movement, so called because
in fact he's a proponent of racism. It's just racism
against a different group of people, so it's therefore okay.
He's quite open about this fact. He said the only
(01:03):
remedy for past discrimination is future discrimination, and he's in
favor of that. And so that was the propaganda that
he was willing to stew for an hour at Arizona
State University and charge the Arizona tax payers thirty five
thousand dollars for it.
Speaker 1 (01:17):
Yeah, he's the guy that invented this whole idea of
there's no such thing as being not racist. You're either
racist or anti racist, which is yes.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
And therefore there are acceptable forms of racism, and that
means hating white people is acceptable, whereas anybody else it's
not acceptable. And you know, of course, this is nothing new,
this sort of this doctrine that it's okay for the
so called oppressed to be racist against those who have
allegedly oppressed them. You know, that's well over a century old.
(01:47):
It was you know, fashioned first in Germany in the
nineteen twenties.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Right, So this transitions nicely into the fact that DEI training,
kind of similar to the ibramex candy philosophy, is catch
and fire all across the country, or has over the
last several years, businesses, universities, schools, all that sort of stuff,
and the Goldwater Institute is playing a role in that.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
What are you guys doing?
Speaker 2 (02:12):
That's right? And now Arizona passed the law not long ago,
and a few other states have copied this law that
prohibits the government from requiring people who work for universities
to take any kind of training in what the law
refers to as divisive concepts. That is, the idea that
you are responsible for the crimes committed by others of
(02:35):
your racial group in the past, or that you ought
to feel guilty, or that the or that you know
the country is evil because of these things, et cetera,
et cetera. You know, if you want to spew that
kind of thing, you're perfectly free to do so, but
you shouldn't be able to make me pay for it.
And so the Arizona legislature passed this law prohibiting mandatory
DEI training and prohibiting the government from spending tax para
(02:57):
money to develop such training even if they don't actually
require it. And a FU has basically thumbed their noses
at this, and they've been requiring their faculty to take
and pass this training program in DEI, and not just
take it once, but every every few years. You have
to retake it to make sure that you haven't, you know,
(03:17):
somehow become a racist in the interim.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
What sort of things will they will they, I don't know,
require you to believe with this DEI training, this particular quality.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
The The de I training consists of things like explaining
why you know certain forms of expression or you know, microaggressions,
why you need to watch what you say in order
to because there are people with different backgrounds who have
different perspectives who might interpret what you say in a
way that is offensive, and so forth and so on,
(03:49):
and it's it's the usual sort of thing that we've
become accustomed to in the past decade or so. But
the big problem here is that this is a form
of right thing, a form of indoctrination that is basically
requiring you to step up and agree. And it's no
different than if the school were to require you to
(04:10):
take training in a religious view If they said you
are required to sit here and take our day long
training on why the earth was created in four thousand
and four BC, and why the Gospels of the literal
Truth and every other religion is false. We would obviously say,
you know, people are free to believe those things, but
(04:30):
they shouldn't be able to force taxpayers to shoulder the burden.
And that's exactly what's going on. Anti racism so called,
is just a new religious viewpoint. It's a dogma that
can't be shaken by facts or logic. It's just been
a belief that people adhere to for personal reasons of
their own, and they're welcome to that, but they shouldn't
be able to force tax payers to subsidize it.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
This is a ViBe's question, not a legal question. Do
you feel like the DEI thing peaked a while back
and it's in retreat, we're on the march.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
I do think that, I do think that it has peaked.
I think it's going to be around for a while.
Of course, because these things never completely go away. They
didn't go away after the first time that the ancestor
of DEEI was defeated in the April of nineteen forty five,
and it's stuck around and it's come back, and I
think it'll stick around even after this. But I do
(05:24):
think people are tired of it and they're sick of it,
and I think there are some great examples of this.
There was oh my gosh, I'm blanking on the title
of the movie, but there was a movie that satirized
the cultural attitude in particularly the East Coast, toward race
and how everything just has to be categorized in back
(05:44):
and it was nominated for an Oscar, and there are
other comedies and things that are starting to make fun
of this, and people are just tired of it. I
think the culture is turning away from it and saying
enough of saying that it's okay to be racist against
white people. Why don't we just, you know, accept the
idea that all people are created equal and that it's
wrong to engage in retaliatory racism.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
I hope you're right about that, that it is on
the retreat.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
It feels that way to me too, but it might
be you know, the people I follow versus the rest
of the world that it's People talk a lot about
being in a bubble or whatever.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
It's hard not to be in a bubble, wouldn't you agree?
Speaker 2 (06:24):
I mean, you got to work at it, you really.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
You have to really seek out other sources otherwise you
just keep you know, we all talk amongst ourselves to
each other and agreed, And.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
It's funny because we all thought that the advent of
blogging and Twitter and Facebook would would make it easier
to get outside of our bubbles, and I guess it does,
But it also makes it easier to stay inside your
bubble if you choose to.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
Oh, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Yeah, which a different topic, and I want to get
back to the DEI, but do you have any opinions
of where you think artificial intelligence is going to take us?
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Oh so far my dealings with artificial intelligence it consisted
of me yelling at Alexa for not understanding my question,
or just this week, you know, yelling at at like
a madman at Walmart's chadbot for not delivering my item
within the week that it claimed it would. And I
feel like an old man screaming at clouds. So yeah, no,
(07:21):
I don't really think it's at the stage or we
can predict where it's going to go.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
Man, it's certainly not there yet. Yeah. I was yelling
at the old.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Enough to remember when virtual reality was going to be
the wave of the future, or the Segue was going
to revolutionize life.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Yeah, yeah, well Segue, Yeah, definitely. Segue was supposed to
be huge and didn't do anything. But like I've done
the Apple Vision pro and I think, man, I think
this could be a big thing for learning or whatever.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
I was screaming at the automated thing at the pharmacy yesterday,
what can I help you with? And whenever that the
computer says what can I help you with? I always
know you're not going to understand my question or my problem,
and they never do.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Never Jack Jack. Yesterday, Alexa asked me if I wanted
her to tell me when it was snowing. I live
in Phoenix, Arizona, so I said, yes, please tell me
if it's nos.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
I lost my temper on one of those things the
other day. My kids found it hilarious. I was really
screaming personally.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
It's fun of having them, having the fun of having
them as losing your temper. That's that's why I like it.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
Back to the DEI training, so I understand that pretty
clear cut on why you don't want taxpayer money going
to various colleges to teach people that racism is the
way to fix things. Is there anything to be done
in private corporations other than culturally?
Speaker 2 (08:45):
I do think so, but it takes something that private
corporations lack, and that is courage. Unfortunately, history has shown
that the last institution you can look for to defend
freedom is private businesses. Private businesses, large corporations especially, are
moral cowards, and they very much enjoy profiting off of
(09:07):
the latest trend. No matter how antithetical to capitalism and
how self destructive it might be. And look at how
industry funds the universities, donating money to these campuses where
the teaching is almost uniformly anti capitalists, and all that
private industry is doing by doing that is feeding and
generating its own destroyers. And the corporate world. What if
(09:32):
there is anybody in the corporate world with a conscience
and the clarity to see the importance of moral issues
and political issues, they need to cut it off. And
this is another reason why you asked earlier about optimism.
I'm kind of optimistic in that I think the backlash
against the universities because of the anti semitism that we've
seen lately, I think that's a very healthy development.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Yeah, that's a really interesting observation that corporations, especially big corporations,
almost all ways do the cowardly thing and whatever the
latest hot trend is, even if it's anti corporation, how
do they, after all these years, think this will get
us on the right side of the young people and
then the love our big, giant, evil corporation.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
It is never what I saw far.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
I don't understand. In the nineteen seventies, the companies like
Exxon would run advertisements about how their fuel was the
basis of civilization and it's the good thing, and that
was great. They need to do that stuff again. But
instead every day it's more apologizing for the very fact
that they exist, feeding the alligator, hoping it will eat
(10:39):
them last. And I think if corporate America woke up
to how stupid that is and took a stand in
self defense and said, you know what, we own this property,
it's ours. We have the right to do with that.
We will want. We have economic freedom, we have the
right to make contracts and profit from our hard work.
We are generating and perpetuating civilization in this world, and
(10:59):
we have right and they deserve to be respected. I
think if a corporation stood up and said that, I
think people would rally to their support. I think Americans
are sick to death of the apologizing and they and
they would love to see somebody in the corporate world
with backbone, and they just they just don't see it.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
Well, I think you're absolutely right, and the first corporation
that does that is going to get so many huzzahs.
You can lay out a screed pretty well. I know
you never had any interest in getting to politics. But
I could see you on a stage really getting people
fired up if you ever decided to go that direction.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
I couldn't take the pay set.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
Yeah, this might be Tim talking in his personal life
rather than representing Goldborger on this question, Tim, I thought
about this over the weekend.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
I almost texted you, but I thought I wanted to
ask you on the air.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
So the Supreme Court, with one of the rulings fairly
recently unleashed the world of legalized gambling across this country,
sports betting, and there's a basket. Tim's not a sports fan.
There's a big basketball tournament going on right now known
as March Madness. It has turned into the biggest legal
gambling event in American history, maybe a world history.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
Where do you come down on.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
This?
Speaker 1 (12:11):
I'm assuming that the libertarian view is why would the
government get in the way of you wanting to gamble?
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Yes, In fact, that's so much my view that I
kind of was puzzled by what your question could be.
Of course, people should have the right to bet whatever
they want on the sporting event if they're stupid enough
to do that.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
Right, So I assume that would be the view and
that's my view too.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
I hate the idea of the government being able to
tell this now we probably shouldn't, but the reality is
you just said, stupid enough to do it. Lots of
people lose lots of money and get themselves into trouble.
Speaker 3 (12:42):
What's society's role then?
Speaker 2 (12:45):
Yeah, So now you've hear it on a point that
I think is really important, which is you cannot have
freedom unless you are willing to let people sail.
Speaker 3 (12:54):
Right.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
If you aren't willing to let people pay the price
for their bad choices, then you are also not willing
to let them enjoy the rewards for their wise choices.
And what the what the free market says is people
should be allowed to make their own decisions and be
rewarded for their wise choices and pay the cost of
(13:15):
their unwised choices. But if you go around wiping everybody's noses,
then you are eventually going to have to take their
freedom away. If you promise to pay for everybody's you know,
whatever it might be healthcare costs, for example, that's going
to create what the economists called moral hazard. It's going
to encourage people to engage in unhealthy activities because why not, right,
you're going to pay their medical bills, so they might
(13:37):
as well do whatever they feel like. Well, eventually you're
going to go bankrupt that way. So pretty soon you
start saying, look, I'll pay for your health care, but
you must promise me not to you know, eat red
meat or whatever it is. And eventually you start putting
so many strings on all of the benefits you're giving
people that you're taking their freedom away, and that is inevitable,
it's inescapable. So you cannot have freedom unless you are
(13:58):
willing to let people make bad choices and suffer accordingly.
So my answer to that is if people bet the
farm on a basketball game and they lose the farm,
then they lose the farm. And if that puts them
at the point of poverty, then they need to come
to me and ask me politely if I will give
them a second chance, and it's up to me to decide,
(14:18):
based on their character and their past behavior, their responsibility,
whether they've turned over a new leaf, etc. Whether I'm
going to decide to help them out in that crisis.
And that is the only humane system in the world.
People act like there's something cool about that. Quite the reverse,
because my doing that respects that person as a human being,
(14:38):
respects their humanity, and treats them like an equal human
being capable of running their own lives. It's the allegedly
compassionate people who go around trying to take away people's
freedom and then pay their bills, who are actually treating
other people like their children, who are treating other people
like their animals, who can't make decisions for themselves. Now,
I'm saying that people should be free to make their
own choices and joy their profits and suffer their rewards accordingly,
(15:02):
and I think that the ultimate outcome will be better
for everybody. I don't think you will have people starving
in the street. The three or the society. The more
generous it is, It's always been that way. We are
incredibly generous as a society precisely because we are so free.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
That is the fantastic answer that I knew I would
get by asking you about this. Where do you want
people to follow you or turn to you or your
substack or whatever.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
You can find me at Sandford dot typepad dot com
or at Timothy Sandford on Twitter and just google me.
I'm all over the place, one of the most interesting
people around Armstrong and Getty
Hosts And Creators
Joe Getty
Jack Armstrong
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